Judas! Bob Dylan fans will not be happy at reports that their idol has agreed to offer customers of Citigroup his new album of Christmas covers a week before it hits the shops. Dylan, who is still amusingly referred to in news reports as either a folk or a protest singer, having been neither for decades, has been in trouble with purists before.

The man who sang “money don’t talk, it swears” a few years ago sold one of his albums through Starbucks.

Dylan fans are a curious, weirdly obsessive bunch — no one really needs more than eight Dylan albums, actually — and they have been upset before during his wayward career, memorably for going electric and then Christian. They were already not too impressed that he is recording a Christmas album and now a link with a bailed-out megabank seems to be one embrace of Mammon too many.

What do you expect? He is 68, after all. “Well, well/Ain’t got no bank account/Went down to start one/But I didn’t have the right amount.” That was from Money Blues. Nowadays the Dylan millions are safely stashed away in the bank, though possibly not Citi.

Spotted at an expensive London restaurant: Baroness “Shriti the Shriek” Vadera. Her unidentified male companion was bemoaning the loss of his ministerial limousine. Vadera has, of course, just announced her departure from the Government and is widely expected to reappear in investment banking once she is allowed. One wonders if her companion was someone who has already made a similar transition.

Cadbury, currently fighting an unwanted offer from Kraft of the US, held a dinner for senior business journalists the other night. On leaving, guests were given a goodie bag. And which business editor, having left early, was found to have gone around all the bags and extracted from each the Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, which are out of season at present and hard to get hold of? He has, in his defence, a large family to treat.

Interesting fact: Leon Black, the head of Apollo Management, the US private equity firm that has hired Adam Applegarth, has kept bad company before. He was a close associate of disgraced junk bond king Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert when it imploded in 1990, I note, though he got out with his reputation intact.

A new phrase has entered the economic lexicon — “fiscal alcoholic”. It emanated from the Hungarian central bank and has been introduced into the UK by Eamonn Butler, of the Adam Smith Institute. It is defined as “someone who knows that they should be giving up their reckless spending and borrowing habit, but is addicted to it.” “My name is Gordon, and I am . . .”

The London Stock Exchange has quietly given notice that it intends to quit the Federation of European Stock Exchanges, the not too highly rated trade federation. The reasons are threefold. The LSE has had its differences with the FESE for some time — I am told that the former LSE chief executive, Dame Clara Furse, did not hit it off with FESE's secretary-general, Judith Hardt. Furse’s successor, Xavier Rolet, is, as any good new arrival should, combing the books for unnecessary expenditure, and the £180,000 a year membership fees are seen as extravagant. And the FESE has been lobbying for greater curbs on so-called “crossing networks”, those internal markets run by investment banks. This has not pleased those banks, and the LSE is aware that they are its biggest customers.

Fat cat takes his leave

In the blue corner Jean-François Théodore

Farewell, then, to le gros matou. This is the rather rude nickname acquired by Jean-François Théodore — it translates as “the fat tomcat” — at a time when he had put on a little weight. The now toned-down deputy chief executive of NYSE Euronext stands down at the end of this year, though he remains on the board, and they have just named his successor. He will be Dominique Cerutti, another French national and a 23-year IBM man who runs the company’s Southwest Europe division. There was some surprise that the company has gone for someone outside the markets, but exchanges are technology-based businesses. He will have a hard act to follow. Famed for his rumpled Gallic charm, Théodore came as close as anyone to pulling off a deal to merge with the London Stock Exchange and then effortlessly guided Euronext, which runs continental exchanges such as Paris and the Liffe derivatives market in London, into the arms of the New York Stock Exchange. There is no strict protocol on which nationality does what at the US-European alliance. But the chairman, Jan-Michiel Hessels, is Dutch and the chief executive, Duncan Niederauer, is American, so you get the picture.

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